When it comes to new friends, Republicans should trust but verify
The enthusiasm surrounding Donald Trump’s inauguration last week highlighted the breadth and diversity of the president’s coalition. Among those attending were American technology leaders, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. However, conservatives should hesitate before fully welcoming these figures into the America First movement.
While the GOP rightly celebrates the powerful allies surrounding President Trump, the party must uphold its foundational conservative principles. Republicans should avoid capitulating to the liberal ideologies often espoused by the tech industry and should not overlook the past actions of these business leaders.
To prove their political transformation is genuine, tech leaders need to take meaningful steps to counter the decade-long vilification of President Trump and his supporters.
Zuckerberg, who once sported hoodies but now discusses “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast, allowed his Facebook platform in 2021 to bow to Biden administration pressures and censor dissenting opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Similarly, Cook’s Apple Newsfeed, Pichai’s Google search engine, and Bezos’ Washington Post played roles in suppressing critical information. Their actions contributed to the promotion of draconian lockdowns. These lockdowns, in turn, enabled widespread vote-by-mail, which, according to MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, has been linked to higher rates of fraud compared to in-person voting, even among scholars who generally view election fraud as rare.
Worse, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, personally contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to an organization that provided ballot drop boxes to facilitate the 2020 election. Ninety percent of those were in Democrat-leaning counties.
To his credit, Zuckerberg has since admitted to mishandling the public health crisis. The young billionaire publicly rebuked the Biden White House for launching its censorship campaign against Facebook, but he didn’t have to succumb.
And let’s not forget how Big Tech suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Washington Post, whose slogan was “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” also cast plenty of shade on the New York Post’s reporting of “Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop.”
It's also worth remembering that in 2021, Apple and Google removed the social network Parler from their app stores and Amazon threw it off its cloud web hosting service. The corporations claimed that the platform, founded as a free-speech alternative to the censorious, pre-Elon Musk Twitter, was responsible for spreading violent content and contributing to the “insurrection” on January 6. The move left hundreds of thousands of conservatives without a virtual home.
Before millions of disaffected Democrats joined Trump’s cultural movement, conservatives watched in frustration as the “very fine people” lie from Charlottesville was allowed to circulate unchecked online. Technology leaders were too focused on elevating the MeToo and Black Lives Matter narratives to counteract what could have been easily debunked with a straightforward analysis of Trump’s actual statement.
Today, identifying as a common-sense conservative may be considered cool, but not long ago, Republicans were dismissed as backwater bumpkins and ostracized in social circles. It’s fair to say that major tech companies contributed to the public prejudice against conservatives through their platforms.
While Zuckerberg and Bezos have distanced their companies from the divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion framework that dominates woke corporate culture, companies like Apple and Microsoft are expanding their DEI programs. They claim these initiatives foster a “culture of belonging” and promote inclusivity.
To prove their political transformation is genuine, tech leaders need to take meaningful steps to counter the decade-long vilification of President Trump and his supporters. Incorporating America First policies into their corporate practices would be a good start.
For instance, instead of manufacturing iPhones in China, Apple CEO Tim Cook could explore plans to build an Apple plant in states like Michigan or Nevada. A city such as Detroit, which has one of the highest unemployment rates among major U.S. cities, could greatly benefit from the economic boost an Apple facility would provide.
Similarly, many American merchants selling on Amazon have seen their sales stagnate due to the influx of counterfeit, low-cost Chinese products on the platform. To support U.S. businesses, Jeff Bezos could take action to prevent Chinese sellers from undercutting American entrepreneurs.
Conservatives are compassionate, kind, and tolerant people, but expanding our coalition shouldn’t require compromising core principles. Nor should it mean quickly forgetting the criticism and attacks we endured from those who now want to align with us. While we can welcome their change in rhetoric, we should also hold them accountable to back their words with real actions.
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